1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of manufacturing a liquid crystal panel, in particular, a liquid crystal panel in which a deposition alignment film is placed.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, an alignment film of a liquid crystal display device is generally formed by the spin coating method using a resin such as polyimide or the like.
However, as the thickness of the liquid crystal layer is narrowed to about 1 μm because of demand for an increase in response speed or the like, the alignment film formed by the spin coating method is too thick, and there arises a problem of difficulty in making the film uniform in thickness.
To solve those problems, it is conceivable to form the alignment film by vapor deposition, but that deposition method also has a problem.
In general, as a method of manufacturing a liquid crystal panel, a method is conventionally employed in which a plurality of substrate for liquid crystal panels are formed in large substrates, and the large substrates are bonded together and cut into individual panels. When a deposition alignment film is formed as the alignment film, a mask having openings at portions corresponding to display areas of the individual liquid crystal panels is used to perform oblique deposition. The deposition is generally performed with the mask in close contact with the substrate, in which the deposition film becomes damaged or peeling charge occurs at the time when the mask is removed from the substrate. Discharge of static electricity caused by the charge presents problems of occurrence of element breakdown, drift in threshold value, deterioration in reliability of active elements, and so on.
To solve the above problems, there is a proposal that a partition (hereinafter, referred to as a “projection”) being a spacer is provided around the pixel for each pixel to prevent the mask from being in contact with the substrate at the time of deposition (see, for example, JP H08-227276A).
However, because of a small distance between the pixel and the projection, there is a great danger that the electric charges generated by peeling charge at the time of peeling the mask are discharged to the active elements formed in the pixel portion, which discharge may cause damages to the active elements such as breakdown, shift in threshold voltage, deterioration in reliability and so on.